Class of '09! (...1909)

Robert Moses went to Yale and Oxford. Although he wasn’t one of the Andover or Hotchkiss men, and he was Jewish (only 5 Jews out of 351 people in the class of 1909), he nevertheless made it to the top tier of educational institutions.

His Oxford thesis was about the history of public service in Great Britain. The old school GB model was (is?) a thinly veiled meritocracy, where the vast majority of clerical positions are filled via merit system by middle-class folks. But, of course, the VIP decision-makers were a small group of highly educated, upper class men. RoMo believed in this system—he thought public service to be the noblest of careers. (Public service = being a politician) For the important responsibility of serving the public, leadership must consist of the noblest of citizens.

What has changed in 100 years? Didn’t every US president go to Yale or Harvard and then to Y/H Law School? Mayor Bloomberg has an MBA from Harvard (although he only went to Johns Hopkins undergrad…suckaa) and Gov. Paterson went to Columbia. Spitzer went to Princeton and HLS!

In addition to his preferred pedigree, RoMo had a huge financial advantage. His family was RICH. He didn’t feel like waiting another year for a Rhodes scholarship so they just paid for him to go to Oxford. Would his career trajectory have been possible without this background? Probably, but he was fast-tracked by virtue of his education.

Personally, I can’t believe how little has changed in the last 100 years with regard to Ivy League snobbery in New York. But that’s New York—an old city, built on industrial fortunes, industrial fortunes funding generations of expensive finishing schools, cycle on and on. I was watching Gossip Girl last night (this season is so good because there is a storyline where Serena gets mixed up a congressman who happens to be a Vanderbilt) and realized that the structure of New York society is the antithesis of the “American dream”. I’m sure in a get-rich quick place like Vegas, Arizona, or Florida, you could be a “Vanderbilt” in 2 generations. But everything is so expensive in New York. And everyone hates “new money” people here. What was the equivalent of Vegas in 1909? What if RoMo had been born to a stripper in the “Las Vegas” of 1909? He would have perhaps turned out like Don Draper, but we all know that Don doesn’t live happily ever after. I do picture RoMo looking a lot like Don Draper.. I digress. The point being, New York is waiting to be led by more upper-crustians and one with the right education and the right connections can easily slide right in to an influential leadership position*.And Robert Moses did just that!

*check out Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell if you want to know more about my reasoning here

Introduction and Chapter 1

Introduction: Wait Until the Evening
Caro opens the volume with an anecdote about Moses’ time on the Yale Swim Team. Apparently the guy has been pushy and egomaniacal since then. RoMo walked out on the swim team because he didn’t get his way about funding. This “my way or the highway” character trait remained with him through his years in “public service” (a rather tenuous phrase constantly used to describe RoMo’s career aspirations). He threatened to walk out on Mayor Wagner when he didn’t an appointed office. Of course by then, RoMo was the man in charge, so he got his way. Through these anecdotes and a long listing of Moses’ built works, Caro paints the image of Moses as a empire-builder drunk on power, obsessed with his own immortality. He even goes as far to say that RoMo shaped ALL the cities of America, influencing national policy on urban highways and state parks. Moses gained his power from assembling a loophole organization; the Public Authority. The problem with Moses’ work, Caro declares, is that “He had built great monuments and great parks, but people were afraid to travel to or walk around them.”

Part I: The Idealist
Line of Succesion
RoMo was born on 12/18/1888 (very auspicious birthday: all the 8s). He was born to a storied German-Jewish New York family. His grandmother, Rosalie Silverman was well-off and academic. Bella, Rosalie’s daughter and Robert’s mother, was also rich and a patron of Lower East Side settlement homes. Bella is painted as a RoMo type—she becomes interested in the power she amasses from volunteering with these homes, and she has a unusual interest in physical construction. Robert was actually born in New Haven, to where he would return to attend Yale. He grows up in “snug luxury” and he is close to his mother, from whom he gains the stubbornness, aggressiveness, and arrogance.

why I have always wanted to read the PoBro

I’ve had The Power Broker on my bookshelf since the summer of 2007, when there was RoMo fever all over NYC. There was a new book coming out, and there was a huge exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York. I picked up the colossal volume at the MCNY gift store and lugged it all the way home from E 103rd Street. I actually made it through a few chapters then-- can you believe, I took the book to Brighton Beach and read it while sunning.

At Vassar, Jacob and I were in a class together, The City in Fragments— and that class was about “non-monumental New York”. Although, I beg to inject that the housing projects at Far Rockaway are pretty monumental. We talked a lot about RoMo then, mostly about how evil he was. I think it's useful to paste the course description here, because it has shaped how I think about the city, and besides, this is where it all started.

The City in Fragments. In this seminar, we use the concept of the fragment to explore the contemporary city, and vice versa. We draw on the work of Walter Benjamin, for whom the fragment was both a central symptom of urban modernity and a potentially radical mode of inquiry. We also use the figure of the fragment to explore and to experiment with the situationist urbanism of Guy Debord, to address the failure of modernist dreams for the city, and to reframe the question of the “global” in contemporary discussions of global urbanization. Finally, we use the fragment to destabilize notions of experience and evidence—so central to positivist understandings of the city—as we make regular visits to discover, as it were, non-monumental New York. Readings include works by Walter Benjamin, Stefano Boeri, Christine Boyer, Guy Debord, Rosalyb Deytsche, Paul Gilroy, Rem Koolhaas, Henri Lefebvre, Thomas Lacquer, Saskia Sassen, Mark Wigley, and others. Ms. Brawley, Mr. Chang.

I moved to Brooklyn, and first lived in an apartment building on an onramp to the Prospect Expressway. This stub expressway is a bridge to nowhere (it ends after a couple of miles, depositing cars on Ocean Parkway) and a reminder that RoMo didn’t succeed at everything, as his goal was to have the road extended all the way to Coney Island. It is annoying and dangerous to live next to a highway onramp, and I only wonder what it was like to have been a resident in this neighborhood as the highway was being proposed and built.



In the last two and a half years, I have traveled to many of the Moses sites in NYC, some with frequency. Shore Promenade underneath the Verrazano Bridge, Far Rockaway, and Red Hook are especially memorable. I like these lonely waterfront spots because they are the edge of the city, still the city but definitely not the suburbs, quiet and village-like, with an open expanse of the ocean or the Buttermilk Channel. I don’t think there is anything like this anywhere else in the USA; most places in the USA don’t deal with the “edge” of a city. These places are extremely moving; it’s a monumental sort of desolation. Was RoMo the proto- city condenser? I guess not unless he had proposed turning Red Hook into an urban farm.

I want to see if Robert Moses has done any good. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt.

PoBro 4Life!??!

Well, Tara, here we are. Two friends with ample interest in the urban, who never quite got around to reading Robert Caro's The Power Broker (or all of it, anyway) during their undergraduate educations. We've decided to forge ahead – without any course credit, financial compensation or other motivation besides an ongoing curiosity in this mammoth work on one of the 20th-century's most influential city-builders. Good for us. I think now may also be an appropriate time to ask friends, family and passersby to pray for us. (Do I sound like Amy Adams in Julie & Julia yet? Yikes.)

As I started reading, laying in bed, the heft of the book and of Moses's egomania began to weigh on me. My thoughts turned to the nine months I'd spent with another egomaniacal urbanist, Le Corbusier, while writing my thesis, and I began to question whether or not I wanted to put myself through six months with Robert Moses. (I'm certainly beginning to question my choice in men, and my homosexuality altogether.) I thought, Do I really need to deal with this guy to understand New York, urbanism in general? And this brings me to an important point made not only by Caro in these first two opening chapters, but on the back cover itself. The book is categorized as URBAN STUDIES AND BIOGRAPHY, and Caro, at the end of the introduction, says that the book sets out to tell the twinned stories of “how New York, forty years ago a very different city from the city it is today, became what is has become; and how the idealistic Robert Moses became what he has become.” He goes on to say that “few people have really understood these two stories are one story.” This is the project he has so clearly set up for himself. Yet, this sort of claim makes me uneasy because grand pronouncements like it, which skirt complications and plurality, remind me of the work of Robert Moses himself. (Of course, it may also be that I'm unfamiliar with the ways of the genre Caro's working in; if memory serves me, this will be the first political biography I've ever read, as these sorts of books have fallen out of favor at colleges like Vassar, where theory has replaced them. What little I've already read of The Power Broker was during my time at Columbia's architecture and planning school, in a program with a decidedly more “practical” – and positivist – approach to studying the city.)

I find the latent illuminations in a rigorous study of individuals and their environment to be immense – at least in theory. In the second chapter for this week, “Line of Succession,” Caro offers just that, reducing Moses's family to a lineage of folks with an insatiable appetite for building, for public parks, a lineage with its terminus in Robert Moses. Of course, this book isn't about Rosalie Silverman Cohen or Emanuel Moses – it's about Robert Moses and, ostensibly, about New York. But this reductive approach reminds me of a passage in Mary Gaitskill's masterpiece Veronica, a novel, in part, about New York in the 1980s and the friendship between two of its inhabitants – Alison, a has-been model and Veronica, a middle-aged proofreader who dies of AIDS. About her friendship with Veronica, and her sister Daphne's very different life, Alison says: “Of the three of us, Daphne was the only one who did well enough to tell a happy story about. A story of love between a man and a woman, their work and children. There are other stories. But they are sad. Mostly, they are on the periphery. If we were a story, Veronica and I would be about a bedraggled prostitute taking refuge in the kitchen with the kindly old cook. If the cook dies, you don't know why. There isn't that much detail. You just know the prostitute (or servant or street girl) goes on her way. She and the cook are dim, small figures. They are part of the scene and they add to it. But they are not the story.” Robert Moses is the story. I get it. And that's okay. So blame it on the fact that we're reading this piecemeal, and I can obsess over these small details. And blame it on the fact that I'm scared of both Robert Moses and Robert Caro. But to pick up this 1,162-page book about New York and have these New Yorkers become shadowy puppets, historical informers to the more crucial workings of Robert Moses's career gives me pause. It makes me feel like Caro is hacking through the literary fabric, building a highway to his predetermined destination. And it makes me wonder, with anticipation, about what other interrelationships between biography and urban studies are possible – in this book or elsewhere. Then again, I'm glad the book is not more than 1,162 pages.

Still, I certainly do like all the talk of noses, of tilts of the head; these are crucial things we experience in the city every day, and don't spend nearly enough time considering.